Editorial: ​Like others in Sinn Fein, John Finucane pays tribute to the IRA

On Saturday this editorial page welcomed the emergence of thoughtful young unionist politicians of a new generation. It is hard to think of a better example of this than Phillip Brett, who is an MLA for the DUP in North Belfast.

Aged in his early 30s, he first became a councillor almost a decade ago and last year was elected to Stormont. Phillip tends not to speak about the shocking fact that his brother was murdered by loyalist terrorist thugs. Even in his letter on this page he only refers to it in passing. The letter is a powerful, indeed gently devastating, criticism of John Finucane, the Sinn Fein MP for North Belfast.

Mr Finucane is also a survivor of loyalist terrorism, the murder of his father by gunmen while the family ate a Sunday evening meal at home. He was under the age of 10 when he witnessed something so unspeakable and wicked as his dad being murdered at close range.

Mr Finucane, as a young lawyer, was widely welcomed by Irish nationalists as a new face of Sinn Fein. The SDLP indeed stepped aside to help him get elected to Westminster, where, like his party colleagues, he boycotts the parliament but is entitled to staff expenses.

While many people welcomed Mr Finucane as a new generation of republicans, others wanted to know whether he defended IRA terrorism, being in a party that was once inextricably linked to that terror group, and which strongly defends, indeed celebrates, its past violence.

Michelle O’Neill for example, after she replaced Martin McGuinness as SF’s most senior Stormont politician, attended an event commemorating the IRA murder gang that was stopped by the SAS at Loughgall.

Mr Finucane yesterday attended a commemoration to IRA killers in South Armagh. Many people will share Mr Brett’s dismay at this.